The Intruder

by Hakan Ostlundh

  “But knock it off, of course he has to go,” said Maria. “You’ve complained yourself about how tight money is for you.”

  “Sure, but—”

  “And I’m here. You can’t start letting that lunatic control your lives. Then she’s won. Right?”

  “Yes. You’re right.”

  Maria was with them now. Nothing could happen.

  34.

  A message from Eva Karlén popped up when Fredrik logged onto the computer. “IP number Fårö.” That was it.

  Couldn’t she have written what she had come up with? He reached for the phone.

  “Eva Karlén, Visby police,” she answered, in other words not bothering to see where the call was coming from.

  “Hi, it’s Fredrik,” he said. “I saw that you came up with something.”

  “Yes,” she said. “The hardest part was getting them to give out the information.”

  He heard that she was moving around while she was talking to him. She usually worked with a headset to avoid interruptions when the phone rang.

  “Preferably you should have a paper from the intelligence service saying that the security of the realm is threatened.”

  “Did you get one?” he asked with amusement.

  “No, but they finally gave in. Wait, let’s see here, then you’ll get the exact address.”

  There was a short pause. He could sense Eva’s breathing.

  “Uppsala,” she said.

  It was silent again for a while.

  “The IP number belongs to a computer at the Uppsala public library, the main library on Svartbäcksgatan 17, in the middle of town.”

  “Staff computer or public computer?” asked Fredrik.

  “Nice and easy, then you’ll get everything you need.”

  “Okay, sorry, I’m listening.”

  “It was a public computer. I assume that you want me to call the Uppsala public library and ask whether any of the librarians made any particular observations around the public computers at one forty-five on the fourth of June?”

  “It sounds like you’ve already done that.”

  “Yes. They thought I was completely crazy.”

  “No results, in other words?”

  “No.”

  “So someone books the house on Fårö from a computer in Uppsala and provides a false address in Gothenburg,” he reasoned. “There goes the local idea.”

  “It may, of course, be someone who lived in Gothenburg previously,” said Eva. “Someone who moved to Uppsala.”

  “That’s true,” he admitted.

  Fredrik was not a frequent borrower, or user it must be called nowadays, but he recollected a visit to the Älmedal library during the spring. He had sat down at an available computer on the upper level to quickly Google something, but the computer had been blocked.

  “Don’t you have to schedule a computer if you’re going to do something other than search in the catalog?”

  There was no cheering from the other end, but he understood the pause for thinking as a kind of acknowledgment.

  “I’ll check that. With a little luck we’ll have a list of everyone who sat at a computer at Uppsala public library at quarter to two on the fourth of June.”

  35.

  Maria paid no attention that Malin’s hand signaled stop at the edge of the wineglass, but instead filled it almost to the brim.

  Malin had tried to teach her numerous times that you did not fill a wineglass more than a third, but it never stuck. The same with the cheese, which should come before dessert. Maria had already stopped listening when Malin tried to explain that it had nothing at all to do with snobbery, but instead was about getting the most possible out of the taste. That was an aspect of Maria that did actually irritate Malin. Not that she poured too much wine in the glasses, but that she dismissed Malin’s professional knowledge as uninteresting rules of etiquette. On the other hand she always listened when it really counted, like now, so she could live with the rest.

  Henrik had left at eight o’clock that morning to fly to Arlanda and then on to Barcelona. Only now when she and Maria were alone in the house and the children had gone to bed did she feel that she could talk freely about her worry and about everything that had happened. In particular, it was only now that she could let loose about Stina Hansson. She knew what Henrik would have thought and maybe he was right. It was probably silly of her to dwell on an old girlfriend and that he saw her in Fårösund without saying anything, but somehow she had to get that out of her mind. Otherwise it would stay there and gnaw at her, bringing out jealousy and uncertainty.

  Maria also thought her reaction was a little exaggerated, but she listened with an expression that was anything but dismissive. More like curious.

  “I’m sure that Henrik has pictures of her somewhere. At first I thought I didn’t want to see them, but I think I have to look for them. Otherwise I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “No,” Malin said honestly.

  Maria almost laughed right into her wineglass, but held back at the last moment.

  “I think I have to.”

  “But what if you regret it?”

  Malin looked at her. It was not like Maria to be so cautious.

  “I thought that maybe it would be awkward,” said Maria when she saw the look.

  “Presumably.”

  Malin got up suddenly. “And you’re going to help.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you say so.”

  Maria removed her feet from the footrest of the couch and turned toward the study.

  “Does he keep them in there?”

  She set down her wineglass.

  “No. All the negative binders are in a cabinet up in the sitting room. It’s been years since he went over to digital.”

  Malin took a couple of steps in the direction of the stairs.

  “Come now.”

  Maria got up and went with her. After only two days, it was as if Maria had taken over the entire large sitting room. Some of her clothes were hanging up here and there where it was possible to hang them, others were tossed over the backs of chairs or wedged into shelves. When Malin saw her sister’s clothes she realized how much her own had changed during the past two years. She dressed simpler, more practical. It was unavoidable, it crept up on you whether you wanted it to or not when you lived the way she did. If Maria was pop, Malin had become more conventional.

  On the table in front of the window, Maria’s computer was parked between two unstable piles of papers. She had worked a couple of hours both yesterday and today. That was how it was possible for her to come rushing to Malin’s without notice and with no planned trip home.

  Entrepreneurship they had in common, but while Malin kept to food, Maria jumped from one thing to another. She had started as a sales and marketing person at a small record company, then studied to be a real estate agent, started her own company, but shut down the business after a failed attempt to sell it. Now she was selling furniture and home décor items on the Internet. None of her businesses had made her rich, but she paid the rent and seemed to have a lot of fun. Just like Malin, in other words.

  “Here,” said Malin.

  She put her hand on the heavy oxide-green cabinet that dominated the one long wall. Along the worn edges an older reddish-brown layer of paint was visible.

  “He has thousands of old negatives, tens of thousands. There’s a lot to search through.”

  “Okay,” said Maria.

  Malin turned the key and opened the doors to the upper part of the cabinet. At the very top was a pile of photo paper cartons that she knew contained selected copies of Henrik’s best and most noteworthy pictures. The kind that had been displayed and which appeared in newspapers now and then in various retrospective contexts. The rest of the shelves were full of binders.

  Maria eyeballed the spines.

  “Here there doesn’t appear to be anything befor
e ’97,” she said.

  “Then it’s probably down there,” said Malin.

  Malin quickly closed the upper cabinet doors, leaned down, and opened the lower ones. She crouched down in front of the binders.

  “It must be ’93 or ’94?” she said, running her eyes over the spines.

  Maria sat down beside her.

  A tingling sensation made itself known right above her navel. It was a strange mixture of discomfort and curiosity that drove her forward, drawing her eyes toward the spines of the binders marked ’93 and ’94 followed by a numerical code that presumably were the numbers of the negatives.

  “If I start with ’93, you can go backward from ’94,” she said, pulling out the first of the nineteen binders.

  She felt how the tingling above her navel almost became painful as she opened it. The acid-free negative pockets rustled with a brittle sound.

  “There are contact sheets and everything,” said Maria. “I thought it would only be negatives.”

  Malin’s gaze swept quickly over the thirty-six images on the contact sheet before she turned to the next one. The first ten or fifteen rolls were product images that she could quickly browse past, then came almost half a binder of photo models in studios, Henrik called them catalog images, but after that finally were some that seemed more personal. Party pictures, a sheet from an outdoor concert, then something that must be Paris, two women and a man who kept recurring, but none of them could be Stina Hansson.

  “Here,” Maria exclaimed. “Is this her?”

  She handed the binder over to Malin. A light-haired woman about twenty assumed various poses at a café table. It did not seem to be a job, more like play. But it was not Stina Hansson.

  Malin realized that she had no idea what Stina Hansson looked like fifteen years ago. Longer or shorter hair? Made-up in a completely different way? But considering that she still looked so young, she ought to be quite similar in the pictures.

  “That woman has a much narrower face. And smaller mouth,” she said, thinking about the face she had observed through the mirror glass at the police station.

  Maria took back the binder and continued to browse. Malin took out the next binder and opened it. The last square on the contact sheet depicted a disheveled little head between two lit candles on a kitchen table. She recognized her at once and the tingling in her belly was transformed to a worried flutter in her chest. Stina Hansson smiled broadly at the camera and before her on the table an ample breakfast was spread out. She recognized everything: the scrambled eggs, the crisply fried pieces of bacon, the oven-baked cocktail tomatoes, the glass pitcher of grapefruit juice, the pastrami, the Appenzeller, the neatly arranged slices of avocado and cucumber, and of course the bread from the Riddar bakery and the cappuccino cups. That was exactly how Henrik used to set the table on her birthdays, but sometimes also on a normal Saturday or Sunday morning just to surprise her. Since they’d had kids it didn’t happen as often, but at least a couple times a year he arranged it.

  She could see no cake or any packages on the table, so perhaps it wasn’t Stina’s birthday. Unless they were on the part of the table that wasn’t visible in the picture.

  The next roll no doubt contained more pictures from the same occasion, but she dragged her index finger hesitantly along the edge of the contact sheet. Did she really want to see more? She turned the page. As expected there were more pictures from the cozy breakfast. Still no packages, so presumably it was not a birthday. She browsed ahead. And there … Malin stared down at the contact sheet, her body suddenly completely weak.

  “Maria,” she said and surprised herself by how strange her voice sounded.

  Maria leaned over the binder.

  “But … What is this? Is that her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Holy shit,” said Maria, her eyes nailed to the open binder.

  Malin cleared her throat.

  “Okay, maybe that was a little thick,” said Maria.

  It was Stina Hansson, a whole contact sheet of Stina Hansson. On the first row of pictures she was sitting in an open car, some kind of SUV. She had pulled up her shirt to right below her chin and displayed a pair of perfect, drop-dead gorgeous breasts to the camera.

  Malin looked at her sister. Maria shrugged her shoulders with a wry smile.

  The rest of the pictures were taken indoors, presumably at Stina Hansson’s home. Malin did not recognize any of the furniture. They all depicted Stina Hansson in various degrees of undress. She was sitting on a couch with bare torso, posing extremely nineteen-fifties-ish, straight-backed and with her legs close together. On another she was lying completely naked on a shaggy sheepskin in a more daring pose. On the last pictures she had stretched out on her back on the floor with a streak of sunshine like a ribbon diagonally across her body. Her right hand was placed far down on her stomach and the tips of her fingers were touching her pubic hair.

  The pictures were not exactly pornographic, they were too proper for that, but there was a tendency in that direction, a tendency that was the photographer’s while the model made cautious resistance.

  Malin set aside the binder and sank down on the floor, weak and nauseated. From the corner of her eye she saw Maria pull it to her and browse to the next sheet.

  “It’s only that one.”

  Malin did not answer.

  “Okay,” said Maria. “What do you say?”

  Malin stared toward the open cabinet, but the only thing she saw were Stina Hansson’s breasts. And the gesture, the exposing gesture, the arms that seemed to have made the decision to pull the shirt up in front of the camera.

  It was fifteen years ago. Three years before she herself came into the picture. Henrik was a photographer. He photographed women. It was part of his job. But this was not work. She thought about the picture that had been published in Gotlands Allehanda, the one that was hanging on the wall down in the study. Henrik’s hand around the stick-thin photo model who concealed her bare breasts behind a thin, weak arm. The almost nonexistent underpants.

  “Has he … has he photographed you like that?” asked Maria.

  Malin shook her head.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, what the hell do you think?” said Malin sharply.

  “Sorry. I was just asking.”

  Malin did not wish that Henrik had asked to photograph her naked. Truly not. Still she suddenly felt so jealous that her thoughts became completely cloudy. She wished she had avoided seeing those pictures. Damn. She knew she would regret it. She should have listened to Maria. She had been afraid of Stina Hansson’s loving smile. Now instead she was sitting here with Stina Hansson’s drop-dead gorgeous breasts on her retina.

  36.

  There was singing in Fredrik’s head, he could not describe it any other way. It was neither a tone nor a voice. Yet he experienced it as a song.

  It was seven thirty in the evening. He was standing among the fruit trees on the back side of the house. He ended up there sometimes, stood watching the overgrown crowns, considering how they should be pruned, branch by branch, twig by twig, but seldom took out a saw to do anything about it. It was more a kind of meditation, a puzzle for his brain.

  There was singing in his head. At first it frightened him, but he had soon calmed down, thought it was “in his head,” not in his head. True, he had experienced some strange phenomena during the time he had been on medical leave. On one occasion, several months after the accident, the surroundings had suddenly started rocking and the visual impressions had been distorted like in a funhouse mirror.

  He had gone to the ER, thought that now it was over. But the doctor explained that it was simply the brain resuming its original form. When the brain has been subjected to pressure for a time, sooner or later, when the pressure is gone, it will bend back. In connection with that, a kind of wave movement arises in the brain which can give rise to quite unpredictable experiences, in Fredrik’s case the strange visual impressions. He had returned home, relieved but als
o with some tricky thoughts buzzing in his head.

  What was it really that he experienced as me? Were ego and personality the same thing? If he changed did he then become a different person, or just different? And everything he saw around him, was it possible to know what that really was? Or did he have to be content with his experience of the surrounding world, which apparently could change from one moment to the next? All that was needed was a little wave movement in the brain.

  He had talked with Ninni about it. She said he sounded like something out of the arts pages from the 1980s. He hadn’t become any wiser because of it, but he had decided to try to stop thinking about it. Better to observe the treetops.

  And the song that now slowly subsided had nothing to do with the accident, he was sure of that. He was healthy. He had papers to prove it. From a whole team of doctors.

  Ninni was moving through the kitchen, on the other side of the window glass that reflected the foliage with the still not-quite-ripe fruit. She stopped and looked out toward the garden, as if she sensed him observing her. She caught sight of him, waved, and went on, disappearing into another room where he could no longer see her.

  The song subsided completely and he was surprised by a strong feeling of happiness. He was happy because he could stand there in his garden. Because he had Ninni. And because he had Simon and Joakim. The happiness he felt was a lightness difficult to describe. It swept forth like a wind through the trees. He felt quietly euphoric.

  Then came a whiff of hog manure from the neighbor, bringing him back down to earth.

  37.

  Malin loaded the shopping cart with vegetables. At this time of year the produce case was full of organic and locally grown. It was not just that it was right, the vegetables on Gotland were also the best in the country. This was due to a large extent, of course, to the location, Sweden’s best cultivation zone, but also that there were quite a few farmers who really cared. Even if one of the biggest producers went to jail for toxic dumping some years ago, there were also many who chose to farm organically.